Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
For the short story writer, Matthews argued in 1885, “more than anyone else, the half is more than the whole.” That was a good early estimate. But our examples suggest that sometimes an eighth will do, or a sixteenth, or still less. Indeed, the virtuoso of the very short story can conjure a fiction out of almost nothing.
Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested
From Slashfilm, a list of the Top 100 Movies Of All Time. More accurate to call this a list of favorite movies rather than the best ones...lots of crowd-pleasing comedies on here.
What: Starting with English responses, Bard can now bring in images from Google Search, so you can get helpful responses with visuals. You can also ask Bard for images directly. Bard will show a source for each image.
Why: Images can help you communicate your ideas more effectively. They can bring concepts to life, make recommendations more persuasive, and enhance responses when you ask for visual information.
Anthropologist of filth. Chuck Berry's sexual predilections were seen as un-chic, un-romantic, and too “real” for public taste...
Chuck Berry: An American Life, by RJ Smith.
By the time Chuck Berry had his breakout hit “Maybellene” in the summer of 1955, he was already nearly thirty years old, with significant experience: he had spent three years of his adolescence in a reformatory for armed robbery; been a boxer and a janitor; worked in an automobile factory and an ammunition plant; trained as a hair stylist and a beautician; been married for nearly seven years; and been industrious and canny enough to purchase a pretty three-room house for himself and his wife, Themetta, known as Toddy. He had one existence chalked up, and was headed out toward several more.American life»
Beyond eating, drinking, speaking, and smiling: 42 ways of communicating by bringing your hands to your mouth 42 ways »
There is a memorable scene in the miniseries based onLonesome Dove, the Larry McMurtry novel about the exploits of two former Texas Rangers, life-loving Gus McCrae (Robert Duvall) and silent-type Woodrow F. Call (Tommy Lee Jones), on a cattle drive to Montana. After the burial of a young cowboy who drowned during a river crossing, “Captain” Call announces, “The best thing to do for death is to ride off from it.” Reeling with grief, the other men visibly want something more than this clipped advice, even as they resignedly turn their horses to ride after Call.
Whether in cataclysmic losses, trials and tribulations, or just everyday disappointments, life offers opportunities for it to fall short and for us to fall short. Isn’t it bad enough that we fail so often, and fall so hard, with such devastating consequences? When it comes to failure of whatever stripe, can’t we just follow in the footsteps of the stoic Captain Call and “ride off from it”?
The philosopher Costică Brădățan, who is also Los Angeles Review of Books religion and comparative studies editor, answers with an unequivocal no. Instead, he asks us to hold our horses and embrace failures of all kinds, from mere shortcomings to death. And in In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility, he devotes his considerable powers of observation to the distinct potential of the acceptance of failure to liberate.
The book begins with a moment of panic in an imagined scenario in which a plane engine has caught fire and passengers face the possibility of their imminent demise. In this case, all are fine after a safe landing, but such scares, according to Brădățan, make us realize that our life is just a brief moment between “two instantiations of nothingness”: “Nothing first—dense, impenetrable nothingness. Then a flickering. Then nothing again, endlessly.” His premise is that the reality of death and the individual human’s smallness in relation to space and time—“We are next to nothing, in fact”—lies behind most of our endeavors, from religion to art, which “seek to make this unbearable fact a little more bearable.” Yet many such endeavors only obscure the fundamental reality of things. Instead, Brădățan calls for an “eyes-wide-open approach” that can remove us from our immediate surroundings and allow for the contemplation needed to transform this reality. Far from being an occasional exception, failure is an inherent part of human life. He suggests that direct confrontation with failures large and small can provide a “failure-based therapy” to help us handle this fact.
The book interweaves philosophical meditations on the meaning of failure with stories of particular people who experienced notable defeats in their lives and in their thoughts. Each chapter focuses on a case that illustrates a particular form of failure: physical (French philosopher Simone Weil), political (Indian anticolonialist Mahatma Gandhi), social (Romanian-born French philosopher Emil Cioran), and biological (Japanese author Yukio Mishima). These minibiographies, and those of others whom Brădățan mentions more briefly, such as George Orwell, Leo Tolstoy, and Seneca, provide vivid illustrations, in all too painful detail, of the failures of their subjects and, by extension, humankind more generally. By turn, these chapters give attention to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, totalitarianism, and the rise of capitalism, status anxiety, and consumerism—and still other historical developments.
In Simone Weil, Brădățan sees an exceptional thinker whose lifelong struggle with chronic illness and physical limitation informed her practice of self-starvation and her unique spiritual interpretations, which he sees as having much in common with Gnosticism. Raised in comfort, Weil spent a year as a factory worker, discovering, Brădățan writes, that she felt a “fundamental empathy toward the underprivileged” that she cultivated throughout the rest of her life. On the basis of this and other experiences, she concluded that modern industrialism essentially turns workers into slaves by requiring not only physical obedience but a vacating of the mind, causing a category of pain and oppression beyond ordinary suffering, which she called “affliction,” a thoroughgoing enslavement of the soul. A further conclusion she derived from this factory experience was that such hardship—her own and that of others—should be understood in spiritual terms as redemptive. While she drew on Christianity, she took it in her own direction. As Brădățan puts it, “Weil clearly had a religious calling, but hers was a heretic’s vocation.” She endeavored to nurture within herself a radical humility, but to the extreme in her concept of “decreation,” a kind of spiritual justification for self-annihilation, or at the least for a concept of living as being mainly about dying.
In Mahatma Gandhi, Brădățan finds the exceptional leader of nonviolent resistance whose personal failings and political blind spots conflicted glaringly with his usually irreproachable public persona. In An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth, Gandhi lays out failure after failure, to the point that, in Brădățan’s judgment, he “is swimming in failure, and sometimes coming close to drowning,” in an extended set of confessions that amount to “more self-flagellation than literature.” Critics have since added to this litany of failures still others, even more disturbing than those Gandhi recounted himself. Just one example Brădățan cites entails comments, some anti-Semitic, some more generally cruel, denoting “a cavalier attitude toward the death of others.”
Noted for his aphoristic style—he called himself “un homme de fragment”—Romanian-born French writer Emil Cioran produced The Trouble With Being Born, among many other works. Brădățan says Cioran was drawn to people who might be considered failures in the sense embodied in modern usage of the word loser, and that he practiced this kind of failure himself “in style.” A modern-day Diogenes, Cioran never took another full-time job after an early (failed) stint as teacher, and he would dine in any house that might host him on a given night in return for his philosophical conversation. For a time, he was besotted with Nazism for its “cult of irrationality” and virility, and, responding to what he saw as the mediocre culture of his country of birth, deemed even terror and dictatorship acceptable methods for putting country first. But after the Second World War, and for the rest of his life, he felt profoundly ashamed of his earlier views. He is perhaps the best exemplar of Brădățan’s idea that confronting failure can be a path to somewhere.
Yukio Mishima published scores of books, plays, short stories, and essays, and was known for many other activities from bodybuilding to directing movies. Although Mishima was a success in the world’s terms, Brădățan writes that he spent his life obsessed with death, particularly his own, which he envisioned in the “very Japanese tradition of ‘noble failures.’” In this tradition, the perseverance of heroes in the face of inevitable tragedy gives them a special allure, a pathos earned from the fear that all of their heroics will be in vain. Fascinated by this tradition, in which heroes ended their lives by ritual suicide, Mishima sought to die like a samurai. “Mishima was not a humble man,” Brădățan explains, though he tried to make himself one through the death he had imagined for himself.
Perhaps because of the nature of the kinds of failures Mishima and the others came up against in their lives, many episodes of In Praise of Failure are hard going. But this also has to do with those failures they brought on themselves. Brădățan’s portraits lean toward the sympathetic—perhaps even the empathetic—but now and then his observations about the sheer arrogance of some of these spine-chilling projects of self-creation (often via self-destruction) provide precious rays of light. Brădățan argues that we should not run from failure, but face it, clear eyed, because facing our failures makes us humble, and, by becoming humble, we can live better lives. The tantalizing possibility he holds out is that the philosophy of failure might help heal some of the deepest wounds to our souls.
This book is about the art of living a good life, and Brădățan’s voice is like a steady and charming guide through a moonless night. He seems certain of his premise—that a human life is just a brief and beautiful interval with gaping nothingness on either side. He dispatches with simplistic notions of a kind of unaltered, endless life-extension found in various forms of religious fundamentalism and philosophical posthumanism. But this is perhaps a false choice. The options, after all, are not limited to the wishful thinking of literal immortality, in a triumph over human limits, or complete absence in the universe. Whether an atheist, an agnostic, or a person of faith, one can accept the reality of physical death and still grasp that this is not the end of the story. Even those who might find all talk of the spirit counterfactual might also remain convinced that loves rooted deep within us take us beyond ourselves.
This premise of nothingness might reflect a genuine Gnostic notion of the material world as inherently a failure. But why take the Gnostics’ word for it? They saw the universe as divided between cosmic forces of good and evil and the creator God as a malign divinity inferior to the real supreme force. Only certain humans possessed of a divine spark—their special knowledge, or gnosis—could awaken from the illusory world of ordinary existence and reunite with the ultimate divine spirit. Not exactly a recipe for humility.
But Brădățan’s argument in praise of failure rests on its ability to make us humble. We err. Others err. The world falls short. We will die. And knowledge of this liberates us from what? Seemingly from the notion that there is anything besides failure.
Brădățan’s praise of failure is brilliant precisely because there is something besides failure. But perhaps the opposite of failure in this case, when defined as nothingness, is not success as much as presence. Brădățan seems to hint at this in his epilogue, an ode to the vital potential of narrative to transform us. A story presupposes not nothing but something before and after, as soon as we grasp that we are not alone in the universe: Our story is inextricable from those of others, and our attachments transcend the brief moment of our lives. The death of a human being is not failure, but one of the most vivid signs of the certainty of presence. As anyone grieving a lost loved one will attest, it is hardly nothingness that follows death.
What is so painful about the thought of death, whether our own or that of others, is not that unending nothingness precedes and follows each life. It is, to the contrary, the sheer abundance of it all, despite—some say because of—our inevitable suffering: the multitudinous moments leading up to the particularities of a single existence, the staggering intricacies filling to overflowing our moments of living, whole new resonances sounding well after the body has given out, stirring others in countless mysterious ways. This is the real infinity. Being humbled by our failures is a necessity, and we can achieve this state of humility more readily with Brădățan as our guide. Yet our failures can ultimately be borne only through disciplined remembrance of the plenitude of presence. And the only true failure would be to forget that.
“The problem of the world is this,” Orwell told a friend late in life. “Can we get men to behave decently to each other if they no longer believe in God?”... more »
"I like to imagine that I would survive, thrive even, conveniently forgetting that my life of indoor pursuits, reading, writing, and streaming drama box sets whilst ordering pizza, has probably not provided me with the skills I’d need." - LitHub
“Complexity neither disguised the shortcomings of poor essays, nor enhanced the appeal of high-quality essays.” In other words, George Orwell got it right: “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” - Big Think
Last week, popular YouTuber, author, and science communicator Hank Green announced that he had cancer (very treatable Hodgkin's lymphoma). His video announcement was part of a series of back-and-forth videos he does with his brother John Green, popular YouTuber and novelist. John replied to Hank's video with a short one of his own, noting that humor is one way that people deal with grief but also a way in which we can accompany people through tough times.
At a time of rapid global innovation, Thomson Reuters is at the forefront, helping its customers unlock the potential to automate workflows, provide powerful insights, and drive efficiencies with content-driven AI technology. Following Thomson Reuters announcement that it intends to invest more than $100 million annually on AI capabilities at its Q1 FY23 results, the company also today announces a new plugin with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft’s advanced AI experiences across its productivity suite.
This integration will bolster efforts for redefined professional work starting with legal research, drafting, and client collaboration.“
See also via YouTube: Joshua Kubicki – Short video talking about the impact of how embedded generative AI will influence lawyers’ work. Based on Microsoft Build’s demo of Thomson Reuters’ demo of Copilot in reviewing a legal contract. Also shows the Thomson Reuters demo of the same scenario.”
New questions are raised over the tax office’s insistence it was prohibited from telling Treasury and other departments when it discovered PwC was profiteering from confidential information. ByKaren Middleton.
Tax Practitioners Board chief executive secretary Michael O’Neill during a senate budget estimates hearing in Canberra on Wednesday.
CREDIT: AAP IMAGE / MICK TSIKAS
The agencies most involved in responding to professional services giant PwC’s misuse of government information are facing growing concerns about their handling of the breach, including the Australian Taxation Office’s insistence that it could not legally alert government.
In senate budget estimates hearings this week, ATO commissioner Chris Jordan said secrecy provisions prevented his agency from notifying even its portfolio department, Treasury, of evidence that the accounting giant – which held hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts – appeared to have used confidential information for its own gain.
“We could not provide that information to the assistant treasurer or the treasurer,” Jordan said. “In fact, we could not provide it to Treasury.”
The commissioner said that was the advice from both the ATO’s general counsel and the Australian Government Solicitor. Jordan suggested secrecy laws, which are already under review across government, were sometimes too limiting.
“It is, in a modern day, I feel, very restrictive in sharing information, say, with Treasury,” he said of the provisions. “We had advice that we couldn’t. It would be a breach of the law.”
The Saturday Paper asked the ATO to specify which legislative provisions had prevented any disclosure beyond the Australian Federal Police and the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB).
The ATO cited Division 355 of the Tax Administration Act. Asked to nominate which part of that division, it declined to elaborate. Treasury also refused to be more specific.
But the senate’s economics estimates committee heard that the ATO and the TPB, which subsequently investigated the allegations against PwC and its partner Peter-John Collins, received different advice on exactly the same law.
“It allows a series of exceptions,” TPB chief executive secretary Michael O’Neill said of Division 355 in the act. “Our legal advice said we’re able to, say, engage with the Treasury, because we were able to determine that the Treasury had records which would be relevant to our investigation. So that caused us to seek copies of those records from the Treasury.”
After a two-year investigation, the TPB deregistered Collins for two years in December and rebuked PwC over Collins’s use of information he had received during confidential government briefings between 2013 and 2016 to solicit new clients and advise on how to sidestep the impending laws.
On Monday, PwC acting chief executive Kristin Stubbins issued a statement apologising for the company’s actions.
“Although investigations are still under way, we know enough about what went wrong to acknowledge that this situation was completely unacceptable,” she said.
Stubbins revealed nine partners had been sent on leave, two had been stood down from leadership roles and the wing of the company that consulted to government was being separated from the rest of the business.
Evidence to this week’s senate hearings confirmed it was the ATO that first detected in 2016 that confidential information may have leaked.
PwC’s access to that information had been via three sets of consultations involving Peter-John Collins and other unnamed partners, run both by Treasury directly and by the Board of Taxation, also within that portfolio.
Commissioner Jordan insisted the ATO was not legally able, under Division 355, to alert Treasury that its own arrangements had been breached. Division 355 lays out the secrecy provisions guarding “protected information”, defined as information obtained or disclosed under a tax law. It is focused on information relating to an entity’s tax arrangements, not information about whether or not an entity breached a confidentiality agreement.
“Protected information” specifically does not include information obtained under the Tax Agents Services Act. This is the act that governs policing the activities of registered tax agents and the law under which Collins has been deregistered.
Division 355 also contains a range of exceptions to the secrecy provisions, including allowing transmission for the purposes of law enforcement and for deterring multinational tax avoidance and evasion. It allows a tax officer, as part of their duties, to disclose information to any entity for the purpose of administering any tax law.
“There are several exceptions that allow the commissioner to provide protected information,” Victorian barrister and tax law specialist Chris Wallis told The Saturday Paper.
The wording of Division 355 allows disclosure to “any board or member of a board performing a function or exercising a power under a taxation law”.
The Treasury secretary sits alongside the ATO commissioner on the Board of Taxation, which brings together government officials with an advisory panel of selected private sector experts for consultations on tax policy.
Collins was among the members of that panel between early 2016 and early 2020, along with other PwC partners.
But Treasury secretary Steven Kennedy – who stepped into that role in September 2019 – told estimates on Monday that Treasury was only alerted to concerns about Collins when the ATO asked it for copies of confidentiality agreements in 2018 – two years after it first suspected wrongdoing. The ATO made a further request in 2020, but still refused to provide details.
Kennedy said it was the publication on May 2 this year of a 144-page trove of partially redacted internal PwC emails, which the senate estimates committee had obtained from the TPB, that had alerted Treasury to a problem beyond just Collins. The emails involved more than 50 people, with names redacted. These were what prompted Kennedy to refer the breach to the Australian Federal Police to consider criminal charges.
“The senate has done a very good job in exposing these issues,” Kennedy said, calling the revelations “clearly disturbing”.
Some tax and law experts in both the public and private sector are querying the ATO’s assertion that it was hamstrung by the legislative protections.
Labor senator Deborah O’Neill has asked the ATO for more information.
“I think we need to understand the shape of ‘one part of the government can’t talk to another part of the government’,” O’Neill said. “When you assert that the treasurer or the assistant treasurer were not advised – but you were sitting on this information of exploitation of the Australian people, it doesn’t sound like things were working too well.”
Some are also asking whether various agencies did enough, soon enough, and how hard they tried.
“It’s implausible that these two agencies found it impossible to communicate about a serious breach of confidentiality and the blatant profiteering that resulted,” Greens senator Barbara Pocock told The Saturday Paper. “It suggests to me they weren’t trying very hard to work together to expose and deal with corrupt behaviour. Are we looking at a go-slow, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ culture at the highest level of these two agencies which worked to protect PwC? In essence, are we looking at a protection racket?”
There is also confusion involving the ATO’s interaction with the AFP. Last week, the AFP confirmed it had received Treasury’s referral. This week, the ATO’s Commissioner Jordan said his agency had “sought to refer the matter” to the AFP five years ago, in 2018 – something AFP commissioner Reece Kershaw did not mention when he appeared before estimates last week.
Jordan said the AFP and ATO had deliberated over the matter for a year and eventually decided there was insufficient information to proceed.
But the AFP had a different take on events. Responding to the ATO evidence, it said in a statement that the ATO had only “requested advice” on whether there was enough information to make a formal referral and had sent “a set of representative sample documents”.
On Wednesday, the TPB’s Michael O’Neill revealed the board had reopened its PwC investigation.
In deregistering Collins on December 22 last year and rebuking PwC, the TPB published detailed explanations for both decisions. The explanation for the PwC ruling makes it clear Collins was not the only PwC partner who had signed confidentiality agreements to access government information.
The TPB revealed on Wednesday that the referral it received from the ATO was solely focused on Collins. Some in the accounting and legal communities are asking why action was taken only against him.
Over the past fortnight, a parade of department and agency heads have confirmed they have demanded assurances from PwC about confidentiality in the wake of the revelations. The TPB’s confirmation of a reopened inquiry followed revelations from Treasury on Monday that PwC is its internal auditor. Last week, the AFP confirmed the company performs the same role there.
The Defence Department said it holds more than $200 million in contracts with PwC. Industry and Health also have contracts of lesser value.
On Tuesday, the financial regulator the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority told the estimates committee it had just completed three contracts with PwC, with a fourth still current, and that it was in discussions with Australia’s banks over whether any information gained from APRA was being used to seek contracts.
And on Wednesday, when explaining how the Reserve Bank was addressing an underpayment of staff, its governor, Philip Lowe, revealed it had hired PwC to advise on governance. It would not be signing further contracts with PwC until things improved.
“If we’re taking advice on integrity and processes and audit from people, we want to know that they meet the standards in their own commercial behaviour that we would expect to meet in our institution,” Lowe said. “If they don’t do that, then we don’t want to work with them.”
Lowe said the RBA expected transparency and accountability and PwC had not met those standards.
“Trust is the cornerstone of their profession, because they’re providing assurance to us,” Lowe said. “And if they can’t be trusted, how can you ask them to provide assurance to us and advice to us?”
Over the past week, more details have also emerged of how the PwC scandal unfolded. It reaches back to late 2013, when Peter-John Collins and unnamed others from PwC were among those Treasury consulted on implementing an international anti-tax-avoidance measure.
That group continued to meet until June 2017, according to a Treasury submission to its minister, Jim Chalmers, written the day before the TPB published its findings against Collins and PwC in December last year, and released under freedom of information law in February.
In addition, some members of that group, including Collins, were also involved in separate confidential consultations on developing tax-avoidance legislation. In the 2015 budget, the then government unveiled its crackdown measures.
Collins joined the Board of Taxation advisory panel early the next year.
The ATO revealed this week that it first became suspicious in January 2016 when new tax laws took effect and “a handful of multinationals” swiftly restructured their business arrangements to sidestep Australia’s new tax-avoidance crackdown.
ATO Second Commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn said 44 companies had restructured and about a third of those were PwC clients. The ATO prosecuted three companies – Glencore, Carlton & United Breweries and international brewer AB InBev – all of which were PwC clients.
Chris Jordan said the ATO issued three alerts about these practices in 2016 and managed to head off the avoidance.
Giving evidence on Tuesday evening, Jordan volunteered that the breach could have cost the taxpayer $180 million in lost revenue. But he said the ATO stopped it.
“We got on top of this early and stopped any tax loss in Australia from this egregious behaviour,” Jordan said. “And this will only harden our resolve to continue the work we do every day to make sure everybody pays their fair share of tax in Australia as the community expects.”
He said when the ATO sought to access PwC’s internal correspondence, the company had tried to claim legal professional privilege to avoid providing it.
“Despite our best efforts, due to the obstacles placed in our path, it took a long time to obtain the information requested,” Jordan said.
The ATO had started to acquire PwC’s internal communications in 2017 and for the two years that followed. In 2019, it took an assistant commissioner and 20 staff offline to focus on the issue.
This week, Michael O’Neill detailed that board’s involvement with the PwC allegations. O’Neill said the ATO had alerted the TPB to its concerns about Collins and PwC at a meeting on April 2, 2020.
A formal ATO referral to investigate PwC’s activities did not arrive until three months later, on July 2, and it did not launch a formal investigation for six months after that, beginning on January 11, 2021, though O’Neill said informal inquiries had begun sooner.
Michael O’Neill said the 144-page collection of internal PwC emails provided to the senate on May 2 this year was a mix of documents collected by the ATO and the TPB. He confirmed it was “not the entirety of all the documents we have in this matter”.
“There may be thousands of documents in this matter,” O’Neill said.
The Greens’ Barbara Pocock asked why PwC had not also been deregistered as a tax practitioner.
TPB chair Peter de Cure, who started in his job on Monday, revealed it had reopened its inquiries but had no immediate plans to sanction PwC further.
Pocock asked de Cure whether he believed PwC had acted “honestly and with integrity” as required by the tax practitioners’ Code of Professional Conduct.
“In relation to what happened in 2015, arguably, no,” de Cure replied. “In relation to what they’re doing today, I would imagine they probably are.”
De Cure rejected Pocock’s assertion that the board had failed to deal adequately with the issue.
“It’s my view that we received a referral from the ATO, and that we dealt with that referral in accordance with the Tax Agents Services Act,” he said.
The senator asked why the TPB had not applied to the Federal Court to impose a fine on PwC, as was possible under the legislation.
“We imposed the sanctions that we thought to be appropriate,” de Cure said. Michael O’Neill then said the fines were only possible “in certain circumstances”.
“Those circumstances don’t apply to the circumstances we found ourselves in with Mr Collins, and PwC,” O’Neill said. “It’s just that the way the legislation is structured.”
Asked why the TPB had opted to ban Collins for two years, not five, de Cure said Collins had expressed remorse, there had been no known repeat of the behaviour and it had occurred five years earlier. He did not expect Collins would ever reapply for registration.
Pocock also asked about conflicts of interest and the fact that two members of the TPB were former partners at PwC who received permanent pensions from the company, linked to profit levels. Both had recused themselves from the investigation and decisions in this case.
“Two members of the TPB would stand to lose money if PwC was suspended, is that correct?” Pocock asked.
“Yes, I understand that to be correct,” de Cure said.
Pocock responded: “Do you understand how this looks just for the average person out there paying their tax? The TPB is fundamentally compromised.”
The government is seeking to strengthen provisions in the TPB Act, with legislation before parliament. Treasurer Jim Chalmers said he was prepared to do more if necessary, suggesting the government and the nation were justifiably “absolutely filthy” about what had happened with PwC.
“We cannot have a repeat of this absolutely appalling episode where people were monetising government secrets, when governments in good faith were trying to consult with corporate Australia,” Chalmers told the ABC’s 7.30.
In parliament, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the events “an absolute scandal”.
The TPB has now demanded PwC reveal the names of those involved by June 20. A PwC spokesperson said it would “respond in accordance with the TPB’s request”. The company previously indicated it was seeking to separate the names into groups according to levels of knowledge.
The Greens have vowed to refer the issue to the new National Anti-Corruption Commission when it begins work in July. Pocock queried the time that had elapsed between the first indication of wrongdoing and the sanctions imposed on Collins and PwC on December 22 last year, which only became known publicly when TheAustralian Financial Review uncovered them in late January.
“The eight-year gap between the ATO having knowledge of active tax avoidance by big multinationals and the slap on the wrist for PwC is a sign of institutional failure,” Pocock told The Saturday Paper. “The Australian community are right to be asking ‘why are these organisations taking so long to address serious corruption?’ ”
Pocock said the average Australian was not given an eight-year grace period if accused of breaking the law.
“It’s a case of one law if you are too big to fail and another for average Australians,” she said.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 3, 2023 as "Tax office accused of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ culture on PwC breach".
Karen Middleton is The Saturday Paper’s chief political correspondent.
